Friday, November 25, 2005

Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern.

So Kyle Rayner is getting his own series as Ion, scripted by Ron Marz.

And I am one of those Green Lantern fans. So I'm sure you can imagine, I am none too pleased.

Changing a Green Lantern into something different-yet-related-to-the-mythos is nothing new. Parallax. Sentinel. Warrior. The man-Guardian savior of the Mosaic.

But you know what? They all failed. All of them.

When will comics companies learn that these gimmicks don't work?

And then, of course, there's Ron Marz.

I've tried to keep my comments where I call creators out by name to a minimum, especially since many of them -- like Marz himself -- surf the Internet.

Some people think it's uncouth for a fan to spit vitriol at creators, particularly when the creators can read it. But I really don't care if Marz knows I have zero respect for him. He hasn't done anything to earn it.

Because now that Marz is gaining a toehold in the Green Lantern universe again, Jade might as well have a giant target painted on her forehead.

”There's a sacrifice in [Rann-Thanagar War] that impacts Kyle in a major way,” revealed Marz. “As it has a number of other times in Kyle's life, tragedy serves as a catalyst."

Or worse yet: Alexandra DeWitt gets reborn from all this Crisis hoo-hah, just so she can get killed again!

You might think I'm making too much of the Women in Refrigerators thing. But I offer as my evidence: I have never met a female fan of Ron Marz. Ever. Not in person, not in all the vast reaches of the Internet. I don't think they exist.

There are some (like in the Newsarama forum thread for the topic) that think this issue will manage a year, year and a half tops before it caves in. I disagree. There's enough misguided Green Lantern fans out there that still think Ron Marz is a good writer. So this series could last for three years, five years or more.

But better writers than Marz have tried and failed to alter the Green Lanterns.

9 Comments:

Just about *every* other writer who has done anything with Kyle has made him a fascinating, sympathetic, and occasionally even genuinely *original* character... as opposed to a selfishly oblivious Marty Stu hopelessly afflicted by Marz's gynophobia (chauvinism is a laughable understatement) and in need of a fucking beat-down.

I just... I can't even deal. I can't. I'm not going to be reading it, of course, but I'm still going to be hearing about it when the fans go off, because, hell yes, RUN JADE RUN.

God fucking *dammit*.

(And yes, I am one of the legions of female comic fans who loathe all things Marz. I followed a link to you from a DC comics discussion board on lj.)

Or worse yet: Alexandra DeWitt gets reborn from all this Crisis hoo-hah, just so she can get killed again!

The really horrifying thing is, I read that and went, "Oh yeah, you know, that seems logical. They might do that. I mean, bring her back, eternal joy, only to lose her again ... Yeah, I could see them doing that." How very, very little faith I obviously have in you, Marz.

I'm a lurker myself but I hate to say I think you're making far too big of a deal about something we haven't seen yet.

And you're not being particularly accurate either, as if Jade does die in Rann-Thanagar (which honestly wouldn't bother me. She's a worthless example of a female character in my opinion, and I *am* female myself) it would be by Dave Gibbons's pen, not Marz's.

Of course, I actually liked Kyle in Marz's original Green Lantern run, and honestly always felt Alexandra DeWitt wasn't killed so much because she was his girlfriend as his mentor in those early issues. And mentors almost always die. So you should take what I say with a grain of salt.

I'm the anonymous poster above, I've since gotten myself a blogspot account so that I could play too.

I'm just posting this because I really prefer not to post anonymously if I can help it (I tend to think it cripples interesting follow up discusion).

To make this have a point though: I should add that really, I like Ron Marz. I like his sense of drama, and I liked following Kyle learning the ropes of hero-dom. I thought most of his female characters were actually pretty interesting and well-written. And in the sixty-some-odd books of his original GL run, he actually only killed a female character twice, neither of which were particularly gratuitous. So to say he can't create drama without killing a female character is pretty misleading. (Personally I think it's more that he can't create drama without putting Kyle Rayner in bemusing bondage-type situations with a costume that disappears each panel...but then, there are many reasons I'm looking forward to Ion. Not all of them deep.)